Category Archives: Theatre

I don’t get out to much theatre, generally concentrating my time on film and music, but when my theatre buff friend asked if I wanted to check out the touring production of last year’s Pulitzer-prize winning musical Next to Normal, I couldn’t say no. Though it is, in general, a relatively traditional post-Sondheim musical (most of the story told in song), it takes as its unusual subject a woman struggling with bipolar disorder and the long-ranging effects this has on her family.

Besides the ups and down commensurate with bipolar disorder, Diana is also dealing with the loss of her son several years earlier, a character who becomes almost a dark force pulling her toward madness. On the other side, her husband tries to hold her to sanity, while their teenage daughter Natalie only wishes they could all be “normal,” while she tries to manage her own insecurities. Natalie’s subplot is quite substantial, which I thought was great – it provided a wonderful parallel and balance to Diana’s plot, showing quite clearly both how the effects of Diana’s illness trickle through her family and also how each family member is still responsible for their own lives.

I found the plot point with Diana’s delusions about her son powerful and yet also somewhat distracting, as if bipolar weren’t enough to deal with day to day without a more conventional expression of “crazy” that seemed tailor-made to increase the drama and drive the narrative along rather than as a necessary aspect of the character. I much preferred the less dramatically pronounced but still disruptive early scenes showing Diana going through a manic episode (she gets carried away making sandwiches and begins laying them out all over the floor when she runs out of room on the table), or realizing that her stabilizing medication made her feel numb. Later scenes, as she goes into more intensive therapy and electroshock treatment, struck me as less nuanced.

Alice Ripley won a Tony for originating the lead role of Diana, and it was a treat to have her in the touring cast as they came through Los Angeles. It’s a real testament to her acting abilities that even though we were in the last row of the theatre and she was losing her voice a bit towards the end, I was still captivated by her performance – despite not being able to see her face, her movements and physical interactions with the other actors set her apart as a great stage artist. I was also really impressed with Emma Hunton, who made Natalie such a strong counterpoint to Diana – her difficulties dealing with her mother’s situation while navigating her fears that she may end up just as crazy are very moving and the performances make them very real. The moment that got me most in the play was when Diana and Natalie finally have it out and come to terms with their relationship, agreeing that maybe “next to normal” is an okay way to be. It was emotionally devastating and yet, ultimately, opened up a very hopeful dialogue.

I can’t write about a musical without talking about the music – by and large, the music did what it needed to do, conveying the story and fleshing out the characters in a meaningful way. Several of the songs, particularly in the second half (which was stronger overall, thanks to a more thoughtful and emotional tone, as opposed to the rather comedic and rushed first half), are memorable on their own, though watching it for the first time and not knowing the music, they mostly integrated into one long, undifferentiated sung story for me. There were times that the more complex numbers, involving all the characters singing different strains at the same time, came across a bit muddy and difficult to follow, but that could be simply because of where we were sitting; still, I preferred the sections that focused on a single character, or two in dialogue.

Like I said, I don’t get to much theatre, so I can’t make much in the way of comparisons between this and other plays or musicals out right now. I do think it’s great that a musical with this subject has been made, and made so well – it’s a fairly clear and understandable treatment of an illness that isn’t necessarily well-understood, and makes clear the kinds of struggles people with bipolar disorder and their families go through without losing sight of this particular family and their particular struggles. It’s tough to get both the individual and universal right in the same story, and I think for the most part, Next to Normal does a good job with that.

Many of my classic film blogger buddies are already at TCM Film Fest RIGHT NOW – I won’t be able to get there until Friday night, but in the meantime, here’s my preview post at Flickchart that runs down some of the films easily available to watch at home if you’re not able to go to the fest, and some films that aren’t easily available at all to whet your interest in making it to the fest next year. Hope to see you this year or a future one!

I need to do better about cross-referencing the stuff I write elsewhere in this little “elsewhere” column. That’s what it’s here for! I’m continuing to write TCM programming guides every month at the Flickchart blog (April’s will be…soon…I’m behind), and managing the Decades series, where we look back at films celebrating decade anniversaries this year.

For April, we looked back 90 years to 1927, a watershed year in the history of cinema with the exploding popularity of sound films, but also possibly the height of silent film artistry. All of the films featured in the post are silent (The Jazz Singer did not make Flickchart’s Global Top Ten), and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Check it out!

Video essayist Kogonada tends to let images and editing speak for themselves, and that’s precisely what he does here (with a slight bit of added Godard-esque typography, mostly to translate French audio), juxtaposing shots from various 1960-1967 Godard films to highlight recurring techniques. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who watches Godard’s early work that he had some specific things on his mind, but seeing it put together like this with excellent music and editing choices is mesmerizing and wonderful.

Chuck Jones is by far my favorite animation director of all time, and Tony Zhou is currently my favorite video essayist. Put them together? Yep, this is nine must-see minutes right here. And I’m also reminded that I need to get back to my Looney Tunes series that I started months ago and seemingly abandoned – but I didn’t, I promise! It’s just delayed.

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939’s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”